The morning after the knife before

In the long history of outrageous drinking stories, this has got to be one of the best.

The Emergency Medical Journal has a case study of a man who woke up in hospital after being admitted for alcohol poisoning. He couldn’t remember what happened the night before but when his hangover didn’t clear a precautionary brain scan revealed a knife blade embedded in his temporal lobe.

A left handed, 22‚ÄÖyear old man was brought to the hospital by friends at 0200 because of alcohol intoxication. Events preceding the admission and motivation for the patient to go to the hospital were unclear. The patient’s relatives confessed to a binge drinking of rum and beer, and then being moved suddenly, probably to avoid police control…

The patient woke up 8‚ÄÖhours after admission, complaining of severe headache covering the whole head and gradually increasing in intensity… Surprisingly, brain computed tomography revealed a right temporal haematoma 34‚ÄÖmm in diameter, with a knife blade that had entered from the temporal fossa and was deeply retained in the right temporal lobe (fig 1).

The foreign body was surgically withdrawn, and postoperative recovery was uneventful. After awakening from surgery, the patient could not remember involvement in an altercation, but witnesses retrospectively confirmed that he was attacked with a knife after drinking with his assailant.

There’s also a lovely sentence in the paper which has an apt typo: “Vigorous stimulations only induced growling and repelling movements of the harms and legs”.